Change feels like death because it is

On Saturday morning I'm driving outta the state I've lived nearly 30 years with a truck full of stuff and one orange cat. People keep asking me how I'm feeling. I have days where I have a lot of feelings, and days where I'm too drained from Taking Care Of Things to access my feelings. Then I feel bad for not having access to my feelings at moments when I am sitting across from someone I will miss very much, who I know I will miss very much, but who I can't feel the imminent absence of because it's still not happening Yet.

At other times, I just feel insane with greed for more time. For all that I'm inflicting this on myself, for the best possible reasons, I am greedy.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends tattooed the outlined of the Great Lakes on my back, moving from west to east. From Wisconsin to New York. Wisconsin sits behind my heart, and together with an older piece, I have Wisconsin shapes cradling two sides of my left lung.

And then there's the spot where the Mackinac Bridge, three different lakes, a hoard of intersections all converge at my spine, which hurt the most of the whole process. It also happened to be the boundary between Superior/Michigan and everything else. Those first two lakes I know. Intimately. Summers on Lake Michigan at my grandfather's house, perched on the flat shore rocks reading or watching the sunset. The bay where I cut my foot and needed stitches and my mother carried me dripping down the beach. The first picture of an endless vastness I would later understand was just child's play compared to the ocean.

And Superior, my second great love, iceburged in April and desolate. Flooded with tourists in July. The place I have been most myself, that lone woman driving her red Honda, stopping when she feels like it, camera in hand at every thunderstorm and overlook.

And ahead, there's Huron, Erie, Ontario. Places I know, but more vaguely. Shores I have stared from, but only once, years ago. Places that don't - yet - feel part of my world.

Pain is at the boundaries. Between land and water. Between skin and air. Known and unknown. The moment when you put the truck into gear and tilt down the hill toward the highway, slowly at first and then with gathering speed.

Christmas On The Good Earth

I stumbled across the Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast on, you guessed correctly, Christmas Eve. I just got back from a trip that included the Air & Space Museum in D.C. I haven't been excited like that in a long time. Which is funny, because the first time I ever went there (8th grade, school trip) I was bored out of my mind.

Here's something I put on Facebook. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite in more "bloggy" language: 

An astronomer friend once asked me why I love space crap so much. Some of it is how small the scale of the galaxies makes me feel, in the good way where I know it's up to me to make meaning in my life, because the universe is expanding / everything is pulling slowly apart and nothing will last long enough for the time I wasted picking my nose to matter. 

& a lot of it is how much the history of space exploration represents some of the highest levels of hope and optimism in humanity. The Voyager I & 2 missions were some of the craziest things we've ever done. Hey, hypothetical intelligent life, here is a GOLDEN record containing some classical music, a baby crying, and scientific diagrams that can be decoded based on the time it takes for hydrogen to transition between its two lowest-energy states. We'll toss it out of the solar system and maybe some day someone will see it. Come find us if we're still around / maybe don't kill us! 

That's beautiful to me. And so friends, happy holidays, happy solstice, merry Christmas, & may your life be full of far more joy than sadness.

Voyager record replica at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

Went to our nation's capital.

Temporarily taming the >> ESCAPE << monster.

This spring, tune in for an epic-adventure-or-possibly-glorious-misadventure starring yours truly, Carrie, Hal, blogless Matt Athanasiou, and possible a Surprise Robin encountered haphazardly in the streets of Tokyo, if she can get a passport in time.



This ticket was virtually free because I paid for South Africa twice. Yeah, I know, it's not really free.

My tax refund is due next week, and then I start investigating setting up a long weekend in Miami to hate on Miami with my best Miami girl.

Merry BearMasKwanUkah!

How about a summary of 2009 using this set of arbitrary statistics, some of which may be estimates rather than actual counts?

countries: 3
music festivals: 1
places slept (including couches, tents, rondavels, hostels, floors): 24.
pony rides: 3
plane rides: 2
train rides: 9
bus rides: 1
awkward car rides: 3
apartments: 5
jobs: 4
so-called professional jobs: 1
fake marriages: 2.5
cavities: 3
skinny dipping: 6
film festivals won: 0
taxes done: x3
global economic downturns (GlobEcDown): 1
episodes of Gilmore Girls: 19
poems submitted For Your Consideration, Thanks: 24
poems published: 2
insurances: 3
new monthly bills since beginning of year: 5
snowballs: 13
hats: 7
drug tests: 1
moments of abject terror: 3
instances of utter despair: 5
hope, change: 30%
newspaper articles written: 130-145
self-ridicule, hilarity: 89 degrees.
notebooks: 2
squash soup: yes
stage names: reference to a Howard Hawks movie.
coffee spoons: 66666666666666.

two items relating to previous travels

1. I found these old blobs I wrote after leaving Lesotho. I guess I have been very piecemeal about sharing stories from abroad. So here's some stuff, since the original purpose of this blog was to streamline the whole anecdote-sharing process.

"M. complains in Malube-lube that there is too much electricity in this, the 'remote' part of Lesotho. He wants to start a lodge somewhere you cannot see even 5 tiny lights in the distance. The electricity here is solar. Kids charge their phones at shops. A girl asks me to buy her a phone, but I cannot(?). Wherever you travel, these days, people (who are not hungry) tell you not to give handouts. To reduce the culture of begging, we say. 'A hand out is not a hand up.'

...What is a Lesotho? Remoteness, "Real Africa," proof that you care enough to get close to people? We say, look at this cute village with cute animals and cute candles and etc, etc. Meanwhile, they want electricity and a dam is coming to provide that. And money (mishandled) from South Africa for the water. 20% of Durban now, and hopefully 80% of all S.Africa by 20__. I want to research what it would do to the ecology. Rudy insists nothing but good will come of it for all parties. Alexandre, who says he will be the prime minister some day (or maybe a priest, or maybe a teacher), wants to bring farm machinery to the mountainside cornfields, and feed the people. He asks about America, and when I say Madison is okay but not great, he says, 'You have roads and lights.' What I mean is, Lesotho does not want to be cute."

2. The best single quote from the book that kept me company in that particular two weeks of my life.

"The woman's figure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head. There's a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and this laughing, muddy woman, weeds around the fingers of her hand gesturing to him in intimate argumentative pleasure. This person who is barely Anna." - Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

the riptide is raging and the lifeguard is away

I went to San Francisco to visit friends and family, see a new place, get my money's worth out of Delta Airlines (long story) and lastly take a break from sending out my resume.

On one day, we hiked from the redwoods to the sea. It was pretty much exactly like a Woody Guthrie song.


At the entrance to Muir Woods, right by the toilets. Just in case you had any protesting to take care of at the same time.

Matt made me pose.




Shelter from the wind.

Getting around

I've been getting prickly lately at how hard it is to get anywhere without a car in this city. Not only is this a sprawling city with a lot of really good stuff in the suburbs (e.g. mountains, beaches, forests), but there are definitely places a person shouldn't be on foot after a certain time of day. Or before it. I'm conscious of being a small female more than I ever was in the States. As one friend put it, "You're at the abused end of the food chain." I get indignant and then call a cab. I think I know every cab driver in town, at this point.

I'm in the process of hunting down a used bike that I could purchase and then sell before I leave. This isn't the best city for biking, and I definitely yearn for ANYTHING like Madison's trails and bike lanes and pissed-off-but-used-to-it drivers, but a bike would widen my range for solitary wandering. Not to mention slow the inevitable hemorrhaging of my bank account.

Around Thanksgiving, I'm going to Victoria Falls via Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia with my roommate and whoever else we can find. 14 days overland, camping and driving in an enormous 4X4 with 20 fellow travelers. It'll be a real honest-to-goodness-and-terribly-colonialist budget safari. I'm in the process of researching things to do on the way to Swakopmund, since we're leaving a few days early to allow a slow jog up the coast. I'm pretty excited.